TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

BOOK NOTE: 12 Comics Thoughts

1. If you need an occasional reminder that comics aren’t
just superhero stories, check out things like Palookaville #21 by
sensitive cartoonist Seth (as I did on Brian Doherty’s recommendation) and see
Seth recount things like his contemplative and strangely timeless-feeling walks
and his childhood of constantly relocating to new dwellings (a pattern of his
dad’s he swore not to repeat, though he also confesses to moving twelve times
in his adulthood), plus offer another chapter of his ongoing tale of feuding
has-been sibling businessmen. Good, intelligent stuff.

2. I haven’t forgotten superheroes, of course, though
sometimes you’re better off forgetting some of the old, dopey stories, like the
ones in the little “Blue Ribbon Digest” of Best ofDC Comics Presents: Superman that Malinda Boothe kindly gave
me.

Collected in 1981 -- a time when broaching liberal themes in
comics, even in the most heavy-handed way, still seemed kind of edgy -- these
tales pit Superman against, successively, self-doubt, anti-Kryptonian bigotry,
faceless non-democratic masses on another world (plagued by demons that cause
poverty and ignorance), an oil tycoon secretly masterminding an attack on the
Twin Towers (in 1981, really), and, yes, dolphin-men who because they reproduce
by cloning and have no females have never learned to love and thus attempt to
destroy the world by melting the polar icecaps.

All this proves, I think, that we were already far gone as a
culture way back in 1981.

3. The accompanying Best of Supergirl digest from that
same year is remarkable mainly as evidence that twentieth-century comics didn’t
just make a mockery of physics, they also routinely scoffed at logic and, most
unsettlingly, basic psychology.

Watch as a teenage boy keen to learn Supergirl’s secret
identity throws a dummy of himself off a cliff soaked in chemicals that will
burst into flames if she looks at it with her X-ray vision!

Gasp as Supergirl’s head sorority sister grows to hate her
so much she drives them off a cliff in her car but lands safely on haystacks!

Scratch your head in mystification as Supergirl, caught in
her secret identity accidentally lifting a 500-lb. dumb bell, super-speedily
forms a diamond drill from a charcoal briquette and tosses it such that both
ends of the dumb bell are pierced and ground up, draining them of all metal,
which she inhales into her lungs and then back out again in a split second with
no one noticing so that she can pretend the now-light dumb bell was just
papier-mache all along!

Vow to read stuff meant for grown-ups next time!

4. I guess Forever Evil #7, the final issue of
the just-ended, most recent DC Comics mega-crossover miniseries, sort of counts,
or at least, like most Geoff Johns comics, it has more cinematic pacing and
dialogue, plus more violence, than comics did back in Supergirl’s heyday.

Whether its big final-page revelation of the conflict that
has been brewing throughout the DC Universe for three years (since its big 2011
reboot) is evidence of knowing maturity on the part of the powers that be or
severely arrested development is debatable.

6. As former DC Comics editor Dan Raspler taught me, every
comics story needs some sort of conventional dramatic/psychological arc
regardless of the superpowered and cosmic pyrotechnics, and in Forever Evil it was essentially the redemption of Lex Luthor, who you
may be startled to learn is a world-saving advisor to the heroes -- especially
Batman -- as of Justice League #30,
also out this week.

Given how much the comics and films work in tandem these
days, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Lex and Bruce are former pals in the
2016 movie, which incidentally now has its full official title: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

7. Meanwhile, the Justice League of America comic has ended,
the team replaced by Justice League
Canada, I kid you not, just as Canada rises above

the U.S. in
most-free-market-countries rankings. These are the end times.

Confused historians might one day peg me and D’Orazio as the
secret founders of Occupy Wall Street, since years ago she reported on my
wearing of a V for Vendetta mask at a political protest, which last time I
checked Wikipedia was purported to be the first day those masks were used in
real protests.

There has to have been a better way, though I do not say
that as a defense of goons making rape threats.

9. And for more politically-themed pop culture output -- of
an even more libertarian bent -- do
remember to check out LibertyIslandMag.com.

10. Or if you sort of (self-)hate pop culture, join me at the Bell House in Brooklyn (149
7th St.) at 8pm to see a live performance by the
awful-old-pop-culture-archiving folks at Everything
Is Terrible!

12. ...and of course the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I’ve waited for for over thirty
years. If I could time travel, I’d tell my younger self that all would one day
be well. And that day is Friday.

In my next blog entry, we will discuss that and take a look
at my YouTube chat about it with Gerard Perry.